14/11/2021 The Internal Made External

I’ve spent some amount of time thinking about the innards of the body recently, cells systems and functions. I’ve thought again about the endometriosis to hysterical wandering womb conflation. Endometriosis is a condition where the endometrial cells from the lining of the uterus start to grow in places outside of the uterus, but they still act like endometrial cells; building up and breaking down in a 4 week cycle. But its these wandering cells that are being compared to the wandering womb. The wandering womb that caused hysteria, pain, and mental afflictions.

The wandering womb and hysteria were a diagnosis to outcast female bodies from the medical practice, they were under-researched and had the strangest methods of diagnosis and treatment. Endometriosis seems to be performing in a similar way in the contemporary medical field. With all the internal imaging software and scans available, it still has to be diagnosed by the patient undergoing a keyhole surgery to see if the endometrial tissue is in fact growing outside the womb. Its long-term treatment? You guessed it, hormonal birth control. Or after the age of reproduction; hysterectomy.

Lets be clear, has my hyper fixation on this come from the fact I have a pre-op appointment next week for the very surgery to diagnose endometriosis? Yes. But I surely cant be the only one who thinks it’s completely ridiculous with all the technology in the world to have to undergo a surgery to diagnose a condition.

Anyway, to hop back of my soapbox, and actually link this back into my practice, I am thinking about how I can pull elements from inside the body, to the outside to create an uncanny body. The inside of our body is familiar to us largely through feeling only, so it is generally unsettling to see the internal made external- a thought which has been lingering my mind since the visit to Surgeons Hall last week.

By Freudian Psychoanalysis’ concept, women are uncanny by their genitals being the original home, with which there is an unconscious desire to return to via the death drive. So by being the resultant image of castration, and the primordial home, with a longing for return, the internal space of the uterus becomes the uncanniest space there is.

But metaphorically, we not only see the female genital as the space of the uterus, but we also see it as an opening to the female body, the whole of the body is then the uncanny home, and all those organs and tissues and cells and veins become a whole system belonging to someone else. If those pieces were all then freed from the body and brought out, who do they then belong to? It is no longer a home but a system sitting in the open air.

Essentially what I am describing here, are artworks where the parts of the body are the focus, rather than the whole figure, for what is the whole, than the sum of its parts? I’m picturing a womb-like sculpture made up of cell-like pieces that is a durational work- it moves to different spaces, as the endometriosis/hysterical womb move about the body. I’m also picturing organs outside of the skin, an idea in my sketchbook from earlier in this project had the organs all laid out on a dinner table where they would have been in the body in a cannibalistic scene about consumption of the feminine body- perhaps it is time to resurrect this idea.

These ideas for artworks would easily fit with being made by the means I have been planning; textile based with space for screens/moving image. The screen in itself is an item loaded with cultural context and metaphor – for the last two years we have tremendously increased our communication via and use of the screen. But even previously to that, the image of the person via the screen’s use was only growing and growing, we take more photos of ourselves and the people in our lives now more than ever. It too has become an opening in which to see and view the figure.

With the hand in for the formative assessment drawing even nearer, these are ideas I am going to develop and begin experimenting with creating but they will also spill into after the formative assessment/the next semester for further and deeper development.